It argues that evidence based medicine is a microfascism, indicative of a wider slide into fascism within society. This is from the concluding section of the paper:

When the pluralism of free speech is extinguished, speech as such is no longer meaningful; what follows is terror, a totalitarian violence. We must resist the totalitarian program
â€“ a program that collapses words and things, a program that thwarts all invention, a program that robs us of justice, of our meaningful place in the world, and of the future that is ours to forge together.

I have spent the past few days doing some work on the evidence base supporting the use of zoledronic acid in metastatic prostatic cancer. The company who make it would argue it is of benefit, my assessment was less enthusiatic after reading clinical trials. In my opinion, after assessing the evidence base, it arguably provides little net therapeutic benefit. Little did I know, that by doing so I was supporting a totalitarian programme imposed by a fascist governing structure.

It’s amazing what you can do with a link to PubMed and a copy of Word these days.

Bad Science, where I found this paper, correctly points out the founder of evidence based medicine, Archie Cochrane, actually fought in Spain against fascists. They also attempt to enlist Orwell, another Veteran of the Spanish Civil war, to support their argument.

I’m sure they would have had a high regard for a bunch of nurses fighting George Bush’s fascism (read the paper) from the frontline (a School of Nursing in Ottawa).

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2 thoughts on “My contribution to fascism and totalitarian violence”

Anybody who bases anything on the writings of Deleuze and Guattari is surely a crackpot.

The fact that Archie Cochrane fought in the International Brigades in Spain, however, sheds no light whatsoever on the question of whether some workers in the struggle for “evidence based medicine” are involved in the suppression of ideas that may yet be worthy of consideration.

Moreover, although I was raised from infancy to revere the heroism of the veterans of the International Brigades, the cold light of history leaves me no doubt that many of them, perhaps most of them, were to their dying days, enthusiastic Stalinists who would have had no scruples about imposing their ideology on others.

I have no idea whether Professor Cochrane was in that camp, or whether he sincerely believed his service in Spain, which more than likely was under Comintern supervision, was truly in the cause of freedom. I would like to think that he was a partisan of freedom, and remained loyal to the ideal of freedom, throughout his life.

My problem with evidence based medicine, by the way, is that the only sort of evidence accepted is merely evidence about populations. That is, it is all epidemiology. Applying the insights of evidence based medicine to individual patients is still merely judging probabilities, and it is well known that to attribute to individuals within a group the overall risk for that group is a fallacy.